SDE II: Alexa: Please try shopping; You: No; Alexa: <Sad face>

Job description

DESCRIPTION

How do we ensure Alexa Shopping isn't like that guy handing out flyers in front of a furniture store having a clearance sale? We need top notch SDEs to work on the hardest problems facing Alexa Shopping: You have lots of reasons to shop; but why shop on Alexa?? We're building experiences that drive customers to Alexa Shopping by meeting shoppers' intrinsic and extrinsic motivations through personalization and bandits with multiple arms. Success looks like the pre-order line for the new iPhone before online reservations were possible.

How do we get started? We've figured out some low hanging fruit.

Slickdeals, Fatwallet, hip2save, eBates, the list goes on. How do these sites get millions of users a day posting deals from mostly Amazon? Easy - people want to save money! These sites scrape Amazon once a week, for a subset of our products, that they think will be popular. Well...we have access to ALL the data. Imagine the Bose headphones you've been itching to buy but haven't pulled the trigger. Imagine Alexa saying, “Hey the QC35s are on sale for $150 today only, want to buy them?” How happy would you be? Wouldn't you come back to ask Alexa next time?

Life isn't only about deals, lets engage intrinsic motivators too. People feel great donating to charities, but it's a hassle. What if Alexa told you, “Hey, there are lots of children who can barely afford shoes. If you shop between now and Christmas, I will match every toy you donate .” Many folks would say: yes please - sign me up!

So far, easy; what's next? Well, our product managers are imagining all these scenarios and permutations, but we can't be copying and pasting the same code over and over like changing mad libs. That's where your engineering chops come in. Help us architect the services that put the learning back in machine learning and those if checks out of business.

ps. Some nitty gritty details...We are a full stack team owning experiences and the services that support them. We deliver our experiences via Alexa, the Amazon app and amazon.com. We build the front end in React, back end services using Java on AWS, and do our data munging with AWS Glue, Athena, and Sage maker. When that's not enough, we spackle over the gaps with a splattering of Python and Jedi mind tricks.

pss. To find out more about the hiring manager read this: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/can-teams-really-have-work-life-balance-igor-dvorkin/

psss. TL;DR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkNpBvKtHqE

Desired profile

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

· Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field
· 3+ years professional experience in software development
· Computer Science fundamentals in object-oriented design, data structures, algorithms and problem solving
· Big ideas and a tiny ego. Tiny Eggo™ optional. Co-workers will always accept waffles of any size.